INTEGRATED AI GOVERNANCE FOR SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT: A TRIADIC FRAMEWORK (RL-GENAI-CYBERSECURITY) WITH DIGITAL FORENSICS AND LEGISLATIVE ALIGNMENT FOR EMERGING ECONOMIES

In the contemporary volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) landscape, artificial intelligence (AI) governance cannot merely exist as a passive set of policy checklists or normative ethical statements. Instead, it must function as an embedded, multi-layered, and adaptive socio-technical feedback and forensic recording system. This research presents an expanded, theoretically grounded, and empirically validated Seven-Layer Integrated AI Governance Framework tailored specifically for submission to the Journal of Digital Security and Forensics. Designed for sustainable development in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region, the framework targets high-stakes healthcare and agricultural applications while establishing explicit digital forensics workflows, structured chain-of-custody preservation matrices, and rigorous compliance mappings to the SADC Model Law on Computer Crime and Cybercrime and the African Union (AU) Malabo Convention. The core innovation unifies the adaptive efficiency of Reinforcement Learning (RL), the strategic foresight of Generative AI (GenAI), and the systemic resilience of cybersecurity architecture acting as an artificial immune function with proactive forensic telemetry. Theoretical alignment is achieved by establishing a mathematical isomorphism between Predictive Processing (PP) and Reinforcement Learning, formalizing variational free energy as an explicit safety regularizer. Culturally, the framework translates the sub-Saharan ethical paradigm of Ubuntu/Unhu and the global AI4People framework into auditable technical parameters and Human-in-the-Loop (HITL)/Human-on-the-Loop (HOTL) forensic oversight protocols. Empirical findings indicate that the Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic (A3C) architecture parallelizes effectively across distributed, resource-constrained SADC nodes, achieving 40% faster convergence and superior policy stability under severe non-stationarity compared to baseline models. Ultimately, this framework provides a robust blueprint for emerging economies to bypass reactive governance structures, enforce immutable chain of custody, assert digital sovereignty, and mitigate complex cyber-crimes.